About Me

Blog Archive

Search This Blog

Saturday, November 16, 2013

`Reading As a Form of Happiness'

Dr. Amit Majmudar is a diagnostic nuclear radiologist who lives in Dublin, Ohio,
about fourteen miles northwest of Columbus, and is also a poet, a rare writer
who has published in both Poetry and the
Journal of the American Medical Association,
and whose poems have appeared in The Dark
Horse and Light Quarterly. Here
is “Reading,” subtitled “for Jorge Luis
Borges”:

“I
stand before the books as I might stand

beneath
the night sky. They’re in stacks and stacks

of
self-contained infinities demand-

ing
exploration. I have neither maps

nor
ladders to pursue these stars,

these
books that burn within themselves. That’s when

he
comes and shows me where to start,

a
blind librarian with a lantern and

a
hand that takes my own. He knows the books

for
me, he knows exactly where they are.

When
he points, I at last know where to look.

The
deep night sky he navigates by heart,

and
as he shows them to me, one by one

I
find those far stars opening into suns.”

For
a dedicated reader, there’s much to admire here, starting with “self-contained
infinities,” perhaps a nod to Borges’ story “The Aleph.” Books as stars in the
night sky is a pleasant conceit, whether Borges’ or Majmudar’s, or both. Best
of all is Borges’ arrival, the blind librarian as Virgil to the poet’s Dante: “He
knows the books / for me, he knows exactly where they are.” Borges has served as
literary guide for many of us. How many first read Chesterton thanks to him? Or
Stevenson? Or Kipling? Or Cervantes? For Borges, the love of books is always
associated with his childhood in Buenos Aires and his father’s library, which
he described as “the chief event in my life.” In Borges at Eighty: Conversations (ed. Willis Barnstone, Indiana
University Press, 1982), in the chapter titled “I Always Thought of Paradise As
a Library,” Borges observes in 1980 that he first read Poe and the Arabian Nights as a child, as did many
of us. He goes on:

“But
maybe that’s all to the good, since, after all, children read as we should
read. They are simply enjoying what they read. And that is the only kind of
reading that I permit.One should think
of reading as a form of happiness, as a form of joy, and I think that
compulsory reading is wrong. You might as well talk of compulsory love or
compulsory happiness. One should be reading for the pleasure of the book.”